Exposition. World building. Immersive mindsets. These are all what makes a world feel alive. And political topics in fantasy is not really a new thing. There are so many worlds and topics out there that explore it, and the really good ones get us thinking or feel more positively inspired towards it.
Yes, politics and real life affairs does not belong in fantasy (we go into fantasy for that reason as it is!). But fantasy politics and fantasy affairs does belong in fantasy.
I feel like therefore WoW DOES try it, but they don’t really put it into anything with favouring context or apply it fully to their world as its own thing. Which is why it annoys more people than it should inspire or excite. It feels like most of the moments they have tried, it just has the value of serving a shock factor, but not much else.
Dwarves, Tauren and Orcs have less defined gender roles, though. And where they do have some, they tend to mirror irl human ones, which makes them less useful for allegories.
Not really shock factor, but tokenism.
Random samples of it, with some of the weirdest timing.
Can’t speak for anyone but myself, but not knowing how the Darkspear fared all these years they were left leaderless, what have the Draenei been up to after Legion, or who was leading the Orcs when Thrall left,…and instead have snippets like “Chromie is Trans and her pronouns are she/her”, or “Flynn isn’t gay, because he identifies as Bi”, throws a very particular image regarding where are story writers zeroing their focus.
Do not get me wrong, even if I think that the game would fare far better if we kept it as asexual as possible (that goes for straight coupling too), those bits shouldn’t be a problem for the story if done right.
But prioritising them over other objectively far more urgent story bits that require attention, makes them stand out for all the incorrect reasons when seen from a narrative point of view.
To be honest, the way I see it:
They reek of corporate virtue signalling and pandering for marketing purposes.
Are dishonest in their own nature, as are but superficial samples with “safe” tertiary characters that don’t put at risk Blizzards selling strategy in places where it could be unwelcome if given more exposure.
Author was right. Its appeared that in the book’s introduction on first pages it stated that Blizzard gave friends authors hints about Warcraft, and they wrote stories like they want. It stated that not every story from the entire book have really happened like they are written.
That means that not everything in this entire book have to be real canon.
Not sure about that. I only remember a book about female Tauren and male Human romance in Legion.
You might ask someone around you to introduce you to the concept of cynicism. I actually don’t endorse the wilful confusing of children on matters of their own identity.
Edit:
Looking at the reply below… I’ll just say that I won’t make an additional post regarding the spewing of this particular nonsense.
No, you spewing nonsense. “Confusing children”. What are you 10 years old? You sound so very dense and naive it’s insane. Children are also a lot smarther than you give credit to them.
I hate this fake “think of the children” nonsense to mask you disgusting bigotry.
Look. I dislike the new story and most of the retcons. I dislike where Warcraft is going, but that’s for a long time now, even before this new writer was hired, during a time most of you still were happy with the story. However this is pretty cringe.
To say something positive and hopefully get the thread away from becoming any more of a political battlefield than it already is…
I did hear that there are actually some nice stories in the book. I was just told about a Vulpera story about their burial rites, curses from the deserts and murder within the caravan that actually sounded exactly like what I would want from azerothian fairy tales. If there are actually good stories among the bad, the book will have surpassed my admittedly low expectations.
I’m still hoping on a more thorough summary of the whole thing.
Like I said a posts earlier, I understand that people may focus a lot on specific bits that seem controversial enough to cloud the rest, and how that can create some poor approximation regarding the overall quality of the thing.
Given enough information, the specks that people raised in this thread, would feel far more normalised in a richer narrative source.
Being honest, given how people only talked about certain bits (such as the NE boy that wants to have a traditionally female role in his society or something like that, all this trans Chromie stuff, etc.), the first impression of the book did seem as some attempt at certain message.
One that I can honestly say, didn’t seem to expand much on the actual story of the setting.
There is nothing bad about a trans person. Different cultures even in our reality had so different views on the matter, it’s perfectly sound to take such an approach and portray them as normal people.
To the rest: Yep such stories are what we need more in general for the species. Customs, rituals, traditions, how do they handle their lives and what are they believing (changed Shadowlands some of those believes for example).
That’s a problem I have with WoW’s story in general for most new things (not all, but most). Even the Eastern Kingdom and Kalimdoor novels fall under this for me.
